The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  I took the beer and went back into the living room. The shower was still running. I found myself listening to it more carefully, and noticed a certain monotony in the rhythm, as if it were beating evenly against the floor of the tub, with nothing interrupting it.

  I called his name, and then got up and walked to the bathroom door and tried again. There was no answer. The door was slightly cracked, the steam collecting around the opening as if to seal it. I pushed the door open, and put my head inside.

  My brother was sitting on the closed toilet, still holding his drink, staring into the shower. His clothes were on the floor, near more of the papers from Moat County, and he turned as I walked into the bathroom and nodded, as if I had just come into his office.

  I looked into the shower too, we studied it a long time, this shower, and then I turned to Ward. A large, black bruise ran the length of his thigh, and there were other bruises on the trunk of his body. His ribs were distinct under his skin, defined all the way to their ends.

  It seemed to me that he could not have weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. He looked at me and smiled, and then drank the last little bit of vodka left in the glass. I looked again at the shower.

  “The idea is you run the water while you’re in there with it,” I said. And he stood up, naked and dignified, and handed me his glass and then stepped in.

  WE WENT TO A RESTAURANT I did not know, a place he saw as we drove past in my car. It was the kind of place with tablecloths and a wine list, but I was not thinking of how much it would cost. He ordered a bottle of thirty-dollar wine and a salad. He had drunk half a bottle of vodka that day, but it still didn’t show.

  He sat up straight and spoke all his words accurately, in a soft voice. “You on a diet?” I said.

  He looked at me, not understanding the question.

  “You’re only eating a salad?”

  He thought for a moment, remembering, then nodded. That was what he was having, a salad.

  “You’re losing weight,” I said.

  He looked down at himself, then either lost the thought or decided it didn’t matter. “Have you heard from World War?” he said.

  I told him he’d already asked that.

  “I meant about the wedding,” he said.

  “Not a word,” I said. “Just the invitation.”

  The waiter brought the bottle of wine Ward had ordered and removed the cork and set it on the table. He poured a little into my glass to test. Ward watched me taste the wine as if something depended on my opinion of it, and then held his glass while the waiter filled it too.

  “Do you think he’ll go through with it?” I said.

  “World War?” he said, “of course.” And he was right. It was my father’s nature to see things through. It is the nature of the business. Something moves, and draws the eye, and that is as much as it takes. A day later it is incorporated into the great, messy history of this place and time.

  Cautious human beings do not presume to write history on a day’s notice. They are aware of the damage mistakes can cause. My father believed that mistakes could always be corrected in the next edition.

  Ward drank what was left in his wineglass. He took it directly into his throat, as if it were water, as if it had no taste at all. “Do you think I should go?” he said finally.

  “Why not?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that we would not be in Thorn together to witness an error of this magnitude.

  He looked at his wineglass and said, “He’s probably embarrassed at what’s happened …” He thought it over. “She doesn’t like us around, I’d hate to ruin the day.

  “We’re his family,” I said, and I poured myself another glass of wine. The second taste was better than the first, which perhaps is what separates thirty-dollar wine from the kind you buy at the grocery store. “We were there before Ellen Guthrie, and we’ll be there after she’s gone.”

  He nodded—an acknowledgment that I’d spoken, not that he agreed with what I’d said. A beautiful young woman walked across the room, passing by our table, the cloth of her skirt brushed against my shoulder. There were so many things I wanted, and that was the only one that had a name. “You ought to eat something,” I said.

  He picked at a piece of lettuce with his fork, and put it into his mouth. It did not taste as good to him as the wine. “You’re too thin,” I said. I leaned across the table and spoke more quietly. “You look like you took a bad spill, too.”

  He didn’t understand.

  “The bruise on your leg, the marks on your chest and arms …”

  He thought a moment and said, “I don’t know how that happened.”

  “You must have fallen,” I said.

  “I must have.”

  Ward stared at his wineglass. “Are you going swimming tonight?” he said.

  I looked out the window toward the street and saw a ladies’ hat tumble past on the sidewalk. It was cool that night, and cloudy, and the wind had been picking up all day. A long ways out, a storm was collecting in the Atlantic.

  “There’s too much wind,” I said. “It has to be still or you’re fighting it the whole time.”

  “You’re in the water. How can you feel it if you’re in the water?”

  “You can feel it,” I said, “but if it’s calm, you don’t have to fight. On a calm night, you’re just part of the ocean.”

  WE DROVE NORTH TO Moat County that weekend, leaving at ten in the morning, both of us hung over and grim. The car smelled of spilled wine, and the rain beat against the windshield one moment, and then settled into a mist the next. Once, coming into Fort Lauderdale, we saw the sun. Afterwards, the windows fogged, and I had to wipe them clean with my hand to see.

  Ward sat still in the seat next to me and made no move to clear the glass in front of him, as if he had no interest in seeing what was outside. He had not wanted to leave his apartment. Helen Drew’s story about the Pulitzer Prize was dying then the way stories always die—it happens when there is nothing to sustain them—but it did not seem to be dying to my brother.

  It grew, in fact, each day he didn’t hear from World War. “I wish this weren’t hanging over my head right now,” he said.

  “It isn’t as bad as you think. People in Moat County don’t care about Miami newspapers or Pulitzer Prizes … ”

  It was no comfort. We listened for a while to the sound of the tires and the rain, and then I turned on the radio and heard in a news report that the hurricane had turned east and was headed into the Keys, its winds right at a hundred miles an hour.

  “We ought to stop and get something to drink,” he said a little later.

  I pulled into a convenience store and bought a cold six-pack of beer, and we drank that as we drove up U.S. 1, and after a while the beer began to make us feel better, and after we had drunk the six beers we pulled the car to the side of the road and stepped outside into a driving rain and urinated against the tires. We stood on opposite sides of the car, looking at each other over the hood. Ward’s hair was plastered across his pale forehead, and he had to shout to be heard over the wind.

  “It’s too bad,” he said, “that they can’t take a picture of this for the wedding album.”

  The rain seemed to clean us.

  “MAYBE THIS WON’T BE so bad,” I said. We were back on the road.

  Ward shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. “We ought to get more beer,” he said. There were only a few cars on the highway, and the ones we saw had their lights on against the rain, somehow making the storm seem all the worse.

  We looked for a store, but the ones we passed were all closed. It turned darker, and there was a certain feeling to the afternoon that we were the only two souls in the state not safe at home.

  THE WEDDING OF MY FATHER and Ellen Guthrie went off on schedule the next day, in spite of Hurricane Sylvia, which in the end had veered west into the Gulf of Mexico and hit the state just below Bradenton Beach, and then turned north to blow itself out.

&nbs
p; The ceremony was held in the Methodist church in Thorn, with the rain beating so hard against the roof and the stained-glass windows I could barely hear the words. There were perhaps a hundred guests sitting in the pews behind me, most of them friends of my father’s. It was my impression that Ellen Guthrie had no friends in Moat County.

  The woman who had once been my father’s managing editor was there, a long skirt covering her legs to mid-calf, and she sat resolute and loyal, banking, I suppose, on the day when this marriage would end. My father had rediscovered slender legs, however, and would never go back.

  He wore a pale suit with a white tie, and Ellen Guthrie wore a white dress. I don’t know much about wedding dresses, except to say this was not the sort of thing that dragged on the floor behind her.

  Ward and I sat in the front row, soaked to the skin, and the lightning and thunder rattled the windows and the rain blew so hard that it did not seem impossible that it would blow the old building down. The organist was nervous, and her padded shoulders hunched at the sound of the wind.

  A man my father’s age gave Ellen Guthrie in marriage, and there was something in his expression that said he was making the best of a bad situation.

  My father’s best man was a former editor of the Atlanta Constitution.

  All members of the wedding party were wet except Ellen Guthrie herself, who had somehow managed to come through Hurricane Sylvia and arrive at the altar dry. She was, of course, a woman of great determination.

  After the ceremony we ran to the limousines my father had hired for the occasion, and rode to the country club where the reception was held. Ward and I shared a car with the man who had given Ellen Guthrie away, and he was precisely as cheerful as the weather.

  He introduced himself as her father, and stared out the window in a forlorn way at Thorn. The wind rocked the car and rain seeped in through the windows. “I suppose she knows what she’s doing,” he said, “but it’s always hard on a father, letting your little girl go.”

  “Imagine how we feel,” I said, but it was not a good time for small jokes.

  THERE WAS A BOWL OF champagne with flowers floating in it at the club, and I found a spot next to it where I intended to stay for the entire reception, to drink all the champagne and perhaps eat the flowers. Ward was in another part of the room, cornered by my father’s newspaper friends, who were talking solemnly of their own trials as young reporters.

  My father was freshly shaved and smelled of cologne, and his attention moved from his bride to his friends to the band to the weather, unable to settle anywhere for more than a second or two. He drank as much of the champagne as I did, although he took his from the waiters who walked the room with glasses of it on silver trays. He hugged a lot of people; he kissed Ellen Guthrie with cake still in his mouth.

  And the storm blew its way through.

  “This is the happiest day of my life,” he said, offering one of many toasts.

  Another toast:

  “My wife, my friends, my dear, old friends, my sons … ” He looked for his sons and found Ward and hugged him. He turned around then, saying, “Where’s Jack?” and came face-to-face with his bride before I could move toward him, and hugged her instead.

  Her smile was looking a little practiced by now, but the storm had not diminished, and dinner was stalled in the kitchen. I took a plate of hors d’oeuvres from one of the waiters and ate everything on it.

  The lawyer Weldon Pine passed by, smiling. I did not recognize him at first, as he had clearly been sick and was perhaps half the size he had been when we’d visited his office. I returned the smile, and crumbs fell out of my mouth. He walked with a cane now, and nodded at me, although it was impossible to say if he remembered me or not.

  Hungry and drunk, and carrying a champagne glass in each hand, I wandered back into the kitchen to find more food. I went through the swinging doors backwards and was hit by the heat of the place—it was at least ninety degrees in there, where the outside room had been almost cool—and then stood for a minute watching half a dozen people at work at different stations, preparing dinner.

  A wild boar was lying on an oven rack while two cooks basted it.

  The cooks were both black women, dressed in white coats and white chef’s hats, and it took a moment, because of the costumes, to see that one of them was Anita Chester. She looked up from the pig and saw me standing in the kitchen, holding my drinks. Her eyes stayed on me one moment, and then moved, without any sign of recognition, back to her work.

  I broke into the kind of smile I only find when I am drinking, and moved through the other kitchen workers to her side. She looked at me again quickly, and a moment later I could smell her, familiar and clean, like shirts you get back from the laundry. I stood by her side while she worked on a boar, collecting his juices in a ladle and pouring them back over his skin, the liquid catching the overhead lights as it rinsed over his face, and glistening there, as if the animal had just come awake.

  “You missing your party,” she said.

  “I brought you a glass of champagne,” I said, and handed her one of the glasses.

  “Thank you,” she said, and set it on the table near the stove, and then looked quickly toward the other end of the kitchen where a white man with clouds of black hair on his arms and neck was overseeing the preparations.

  He glared at her and at me, holding a long-handled spoon that he was using to taste the soup, imagining that I was some kind of trouble. I smiled at him, and he turned back to his soup, checking a moment later to see if I was still in his kitchen.

  “How have you been?” I said.

  She finished basting the boar, put down her ladle, and pushed the pig back into the oven. When she closed the door I saw sweat beading in her hairline. She wiped her hands on her apron and went to check on some pies in another oven. I followed her over, happy to be around her again.

  “You work here now?” I said.

  She bent into her pies, testing the ones in the farthest corner of the oven. “I do unless you get me fired,” she said.

  I looked again at the white man with the hairy arms and then smiled at her, to tell her he was harmless. She closed the oven door and stood up, wiping her hands on a towel.

  “Ward’s outside,” I said.

  She nodded, indicating that this was not entirely a surprise, and then looked me squarely in the face. “You got to get out of the kitchen,” she said.

  “Come say hello to Ward,” I said. “He and I still talk about you down in Miami.”

  “It isn’t a comfortable situation,” she said.

  “I’ll go talk to your boss,” I said, “tell him you’re a friend of the family …”

  “Don’t do that,” she said. And when I smiled at her again she said, “I’m no friend of your family, Jack. All I did was cook and maid. I did that and now I do this, and when they don’t need me anymore, I’ll do something else.”

  “You’re part of the family,” I said, and finished the drink in my hand. Without it, I felt suddenly out of place. “It wasn’t my father,” I said. “He wasn’t the one who fired you.…”

  She walked past me again, back toward the oven which held the wild boar. I noticed more people watching now; I felt the embarrassment I’d caused her, but perhaps because of that I couldn’t leave it alone. And then the big man with hairy arms stopped what he was doing on the other side of the room and walked over to where we were standing.

  She saw him without looking; her eyes dropped a little, not to meet any of ours. He put his hands on his hips and cocked his head a little, waiting.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said to me, sounding strangely formal, “you’ll have to excuse me to do my work.”

  The man nodded, as if he were not quite satisfied with that, even though it was the right answer.

  “You belong out there in the other room,” I said.

  “No, sir, I don’t,” she said, and she walked away. I understood she was afraid, and didn’t follow her any farther. I lo
oked at the man and said, “She’s an old friend of the family,” and he nodded as if we both knew that wasn’t true. As if in another place—a bar, say, or a restaurant where he was not working—he would take me outside and teach me to stay out of his kitchen.

  And I nodded back, thinking of my famous headlock.

  I WALKED BACK INTO the main room looking for my brother to tell him that Anita Chester was working in the kitchen. I found him sitting near the front door where a photographer was taking pictures of my father and Ellen Guthrie with various arrangements of family and friends.

  Before I made it over, the electricity quit, and at four o’clock in the afternoon, the room—one whole side of which was a wall of windows overlooking the golf course—was dropped into a darkness like night.

  When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I sat down next to my brother. There were several glasses of champagne still on a tray, sitting in front of him on the table. The storm blew sheets of rain into the windows.

  “Guess who’s in the kitchen,” I said, taking one of the glasses.

  He stared at the ceiling, as if he were trying to understand what had happened to the lights.

  “Just like that,” Ward said. I saw him smile.

  “Just like what?” I said.

  I drank that glass, and then another, but the taste had turned sweet.

  “Just like that,” he said again. He coughed, and at the end of it there was a suggestion of a laugh.

  “Anita’s in the kitchen,” I said.

  Somewhere in the room a woman’s voice rose and fell, and gradually the hum of conversation returned, not as loud as it had been before, but still filling the room.

  My brother coughed again, and then laughed out loud. People turned, and he caught himself momentarily, and then he was laughing again. It was a strange kind of laughing; it built on itself, taking him over, and in a minute or two he was holding his head in his hands, howling like he was crazy.